Necrophilia as homecoming: Jeff Dahmer Was His Father’s Son

The horror of serial murderer Jeff Dahmer which is most often mentioned is his cannibalism. But if we are to understand the reasons for his crimes, we must remember that it was only late in his serial murdering career that he began devouring body parts.

On the other hand, he was consistently necrophiliac. The desire to have sex with someone who was dead or at least unconscious appears to have played a large role in each of his homicides as well as assaults which did not end in murder.

Why was Jeff Dahmer sexually attracted to men who were utterly unresponsive? We find a clue in “A Father’s Story,” Lionel Dahmer’s memoirs. In this book Lionel Dahmer depicts himself as a well-meaning but pitifully confused man. His memoirs are revelatory, largely for what they lack. The author is peculiarly devoid of both insight and perspective.

In painting, there is a vital concept called “the presence of the absence.” In all too many “two-parent families,” the father is the presence of the absence — as was true of the elder Dahmer. Men tend to be less verbal than women. Unfortunately, women can use their superior verbal skills in negative ways, to bad mouth, slight, and nag men. This can lead men to withdraw even further into their shells.

An old-fashioned man, Lionel Dahmer appears to have played the traditional role of the “strong and silent” man.

At first glance, Lionel Dahmer, a middle-aged, middle-class white chemist, seems to have little in common with Jeff Dahmer’s victims. They were mostly black and all young. And they did have little in common with Lionel at the time they met Jeff.

Jeff turned them into images of his father in order to have sex with them. Unconscious or dead, they now had about the same range of emotional expression as the central male figure in Jeff’s formative years.

The elder Dahmer is sadly aware that he tuned out his son and simply did not know the person he had raised.

Lionel Dahmer placed a call to Jeff at the latter’s apartment shortly after authorities had discovered Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes but before they were publicized. Lionel heard a stranger’s voice and asked to speak to his son. The man Lionel spoke with confirmed that Lionel was Jeff’s father and this stranger said that someone would be calling him shortly from the Homicide Department.

Understandably aghast, Lionel cried, “Homicide? You mean Jeff’s been – “

The man cut Lionel short. “No, not JEFF,” he said. “Jeff is alive and well.”

Lionel writes that it was the first time, but far from the last time, that he would hear someone “say my son’s name like it was a dirty word.”

The bewildered father also writes about other incidents that show how oblivious he had been to his troubled son. Lionel found Jeff unconscious and could not understand why. Lionel’s wife pointed to the liquor bottles scattered around the room and Lionel realized for the first time that Jeff might have a drinking problem.

On another occasion, Lionel found a male mannequin in his son’s room. Jeff explained that he thought it would be a challenge to sneak a mannequin out of a department store. Lionel wrote that until that point, “I had never thought him odd and certainly not a thief.”

Although Jeff manifested no romantic or sexual interest in females during his teen years, his father wrote, “it had never occurred to me that he might be a homosexual” until Jeff was arrested for sexually molesting a young boy.

Perhaps the most striking encounter recorded in “A Father’s Story” happened when Jeff was on probation for the molestation and staying in his grandmother’s home. Lionel saw a square foot around box and asked Jeff what was in it. His son hemmed and hawed and Lionel decided he was going to get something to open it up. A panicky Jeff demanded that he have his privacy. Lionel asked, “Jeff, are you keeping pornography in there?”

Jeff replied that he was. Lionel said, “I don’t want Grandma Dahmer to see what you’ve got in there.” Jeff said, “I don’t want her to see it either.” He was undoubtedly being honest in this last statement.

This encounter inspired me to write the following poem. What do my readers think of it?

“Oh, Mr. Dahmer, how we wish
you’d opened up the box”
By
Denise Noe

Oh, Mr. Dahmer, how we wish
you’d opened up the box
a young man needs privacy, ’tis true;
still the world has come to rue
the day you didn’t open up the box
we know you loved your son
a blonde cutie, that one
we’ve seen the family pics
Jeff comfy at the age of six
Oh, Mr. Dahmer, how we wish
you’d opened up the box
and seen that it wasn’t porn
a vice your Jeff had outworn
no, not a stack of Blueboys
not even rubber sex toys.
Oh, Mr. Dahmer, how we wish
you’d opened up the box.
Jeff wasn’t captain of the football team,
in school plays he did not beam;
he turned out something of a slob,
and the man couldn’t keep a job,
but if that box you had uncovered
you would certainly have discovered
that tho he didn’t have much bread,
he sure knew how to get a head.